Category: affirmative action

Nikole Hannah-Jones on reparations for descendants of slaves

March 19, 2024 • 11:15 am

As you know, I go back and forth on the question of affirmative action for college and professional-school admissions, and even after I thought I’d settled on a view (i.e., give some preference to minorities among those equally qualified for admission), it still keeps changing. After I read the long New York Times piece below by the notorious Nikole Hannah-Jones, it’s changed a bit more, making me wonder if the Supreme Court, in banning race-based admissions, didn’t go a bit too far.

Although I’m not a huge fan of Ms. Hannah-Jones (I, along with many historians, thought the 1619 Project was based on a dubious thesis and was historically distorted, almost propagandistic), I have to say that I found the piece readable, engaging, and making some thoughtful points.  It’s also a good run-through of the history of black civil rights and attempts to secure equality since the Civil War: Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, Bakke v. California, all the way through the recent Harvard case.

I have not gone all the way over to Hannah-Jones’s views, set out below, but it’s clear that the question of affirmative action bears more thinking, at least for me. I’ve always thought that some form of reparations are due those who still suffer historically from oppression. My only question is what those reparations should be. It can’t be money, and in the end true reparations mean giving everyone, especially members of once-oppressed groups, equal opportunities from birth. That will of course take forever, so what do we do in the interim? Affirmative action has been the answer, and is still the answer for Hannah-Jones, but the Supreme Court has pretty much killed it.

At any rate, I’d read Hannah-Jones’s piece if you have time (click headline to read; I haven’t found it archived):

The topic is whether we should have a “colorblind” society, as was supposedly limned by Martin Luther King in his “I have a dream” speech. Hannah-Jones’s answer is no.  To achieve full equality in America, we must explicitly be aware of race, taking it into account when making employment or admissions decisions.  Clearly, she thinks that all the civil rights laws enacted since 1964 have done little to fix the problem of inequality.

Here are the main points I think she makes, as well as a few of my own comments.  Her quotes are in quotation marks.

1.) Descendants of American slaves have suffered a continual disadvantage since slavery was abolished, being segregated, denied equal rights, and in general subject to pervasive discrimination. The historical residuum of this discrimination is still with us, and I don’t think people can deny that.

2.) This problem needs to be made right by some form of reparations.  A color-blind society cannot make things right; we must have some form of affirmative action: preferential treatment of the descendants of slaves.

3.) A problem here: she wants only the descendants of slaves to get these advantages. Other blacks, like recent “immigrants and children of immigrants” from Africa and other places, are not entitled to these reparations.

4.) Other minority groups who have been subject to affirmative action, like Hispanics, aren’t dealt with in her article; in fact, the word “Hispanic” isn’t even given.  It is slavery, and slavery alone, that must be considered in affirmative action, which must apply only to those who can show they are descended from slaves. Yet other blacks and minorities also suffer, perhaps not for historical reasons but from race-based oppression itself. One has to consider the moral weight of this argument.

5.) Reparations cannot be based on socioeconomic status or “condition”; it must be based on ancestry tracing back to those who were enslaved, i.e.,  the “condition” of being a descendant of slaves.

6.) Increasing “diversity” is of little consequence. What Hannah-Jones wants is to increase the representation of descendants of slaves in American life through affirmative action. That must involve some kinds of quotas, not just a subjective method for increasing the proportion of black and brown faces in schools. Her stand thus explicitly opposes the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision, which ruled that there can be affirmative action so long as it increases diversity—seen as an innate good—but not if it involves quotas. Hannah-Smith doesn’t explicitly mention a need for quotas, but I think it’s inherent in her argument.

7.) Despite the “colorblindness” touted in King’s famous speech, he also made statements that could be interpreted as favoriting affirmative action (see below).

I’ll give some of her quotes that, to be sure, make points worth considering. Please comment below on the issue, the quotes, or the points above. I do recommend your reading her article. Even though it’s long, it’s well written.

The ramifications of the recent affirmative-action decision are clear — and they are not something so inconsequential as the complexion of elite colleges and the number of students of color who attend them: We are in the midst of a radical abandonment of a compact that the civil rights movement forged, a shared understanding that racial inequality is harmful to democracy.

. . . Race, we now believe, should not be used to harm or to advantage people, whether they are Black or white. But the belief in colorblindness in a society constructed on the codification of racial difference has always been aspirational. And so achieving it requires what can seem like a paradoxical approach: a demand that our nation pay attention to race in order, at some future point, to attain a just society. As Justice Thurgood Marshall said in a 1987 speech, “The ultimate goal is the creation of a colorblind society,” but “given the position from which America began, we still have a very long way to go.”

After Brown v. Board of Education (1954):

Civil rights activists were finally seeing their decades-long struggle paying off. But the architects and maintenance crew of racial caste understood a fundamental truth about the society they had built: Systems constructed and enforced over centuries to subjugate enslaved people and their descendants based on race no longer needed race-based laws to sustain them. Racial caste was so entrenched, so intertwined with American institutions, that without race-based counteraction, it would inevitably self-replicate.

And the Bakke vs. Board of Regents of the University of California case (1978), which rejected UC Davis’s use of racial quotas in its medical school, but allowed race to be used as one factor in admissions. Note how Hannah-Jones is concerned here exclusively with the descendants of slaves:

Thus, the first time the court took up the issue of affirmative action, it took away the policy’s power. The court determined that affirmative action could not be used to redress the legacy of racial discrimination that Black Americans experienced, or the current systemic inequality that they were still experiencing. Instead, it allowed that some consideration of a student’s racial background could stand for one reason only: to achieve desired “diversity” of the student body. Powell referred to Harvard’s affirmative-action program, which he said had expanded to include students from other disadvantaged backgrounds, such as those from low-income families. He quoted an example from the plan, which said: “The race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor, just as geographic origin or a life spent on a farm may tip the balance in other candidates’ cases. A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a Black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.”

But, of course, a (white) farm boy from Idaho did not descend from people who were enslaved, because they were farmers from Idaho. There were not two centuries of case law arguing over the inherent humanity and rights of farm boys from Idaho. There was no sector of the law, no constitutional provision, that enshrined farm boys from Idaho as property who could be bought and sold. Farm boys from Idaho had no need to engage in a decades-long movement to gain basic rights of citizenship, including the fundamental right to vote. Farm boys from Idaho had not, until just a decade earlier, been denied housing, jobs, the ability to sit on juries and access to the ballot. Farm boys from Idaho had not been forced to sue for the right to attend public schools and universities.

In Bakke, the court was legally — and ideologically — severing the link between race and condition. Race became nothing more than ancestry and a collection of superficial physical traits. The 14th Amendment was no longer about alleviating the extraordinary repercussions of slavery but about treating everyone the same regardless of their “skin color,” history or present condition. With a few strokes of his pen, Powell wiped this context away, and just like that, the experience of 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow was relegated to one thing: another box to check.

According to Hannah-Jones, Martin Luther King Jr. floated ideas similar to affirmative action (Reagan campaigned on a covertly racist platform):

Reagan, who had secretly called Black people monkeys and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the establishment of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. Yet in the first commemoration of that holiday in 1986, he trotted out King’s words to condemn racial-justice policy. “We’re committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas,” he said. “We want a colorblind society, a society that, in the words of Dr. King, judges people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

This passage from King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech has become a go-to for conservatives seeking to discredit efforts to address the pervasive disadvantages that Black Americans face. And it works so effectively because few Americans have read the entire speech, and even fewer have read any of the other speeches or writings in which King explicitly makes clear that colorblindness was a goal that could be reached only through race-conscious policy. Four years after giving his “Dream” speech, King wrote, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” And during a 1968 sermon given less than a week before his assassination, King said that those who opposed programs to specifically help Black Americans overcome their disadvantage “never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the Black man’s color a stigma; but beyond this they never stop to realize that they owe a people who were kept in slavery 244 years.”

And, to finish, Hannah-Jones’s indication that we’re not where we want to be:

Today we have a society where constitutional colorblindness dictates that school segregation is unconstitutional, yet most Black students have never attended a majority-white school or had access to the same educational resources as white children. A society with a law prohibiting discrimination in housing and lending, and yet descendants of slavery remain the most residentially, educationally and economically segregated people in the country. A society where employment discrimination is illegal, and yet Black Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as white Americans, even when they hold college degrees.

Now one could argue that equity should not be the goal if different groups have different abilities and preferences; instead he true goal should be equality of opportunity.  And I agree that we should aim for equality of opportunity rather than equality of representation. But the former will be nearly impossible to achieve given the resources needed. Perhaps one might hope that instead of trying to create equality of opportunity to  ensure equity, we should do the opposite: creating a bit more equity as a way of paving the way for equality of opportunity.

Weigh in below!

The National Institutes of Health adopt possibly illegal tactic of using “diversity statements” when funding new positions

March 15, 2024 • 11:30 am

Yes, this is an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, but if you neglect all of their op-eds, which of course lean right, it will still be your loss.  Click to read (it’s archived here). It shows that the NIH—and not for the first time—is requiring diversity statements to hire researchers, a requirement that may well be illegal.

Click to read:

Here are a few paragraphs on what’s happening at the NIH:

Thanks to a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Cornell University is able to support several professors in fields including genetics, computational biology and neurobiology. In its funding proposal, the university emphasizes a strange metric for evaluating hard scientists: Each applicant’s “statement on contribution to diversity” was to “receive significant weight in the evaluation.” [JAC: note that every applicant has to submit a DEI statement.]

It might seem counterintuitive to prioritize “diversity statements” while hiring neurobiologists—but not at the NIH. The agency for several years has pushed this practice across the country through its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program—First for short—which funds diversity-focused faculty hiring in the biomedical sciences.

Through dozens of public-records requests, I have acquired thousands of pages of documents related to the program—grant proposals, emails, hiring rubrics and more. The information reveals how the NIH enforces an ideological agenda, prompting universities and medical schools to vet potential biomedical scientists for wrongthink regarding diversity.

The First program requires all grant recipients to use “diversity statements” for their newly funded hires. Northwestern University suggests it will adapt a diversity-statement rubric created by the University of California, Berkeley. It isn’t alone. A year ago I acquired the rubrics used by the NIH First programs at the University of South Carolina and the University of New Mexico, which I discussed in these pages. Both used Berkeley’s rubric almost verbatim.

That rubric penalizes job candidates for espousing colorblind equality and gives low scores to those who say they intend to “treat everyone the same.” It likewise docks candidates who express skepticism about the practice of dividing students and faculty into racially segregated “affinity groups.”

Berkeley’s rubric is dire, and I’ve described it before (see also this statement by FIRE). It requires you first to give  your understanding of what diversity is and your philosophy of,it then your background in promoting diversity (Ceiling Cat help you if you don’t have one), and then finally tell your you will promote diversity in your positions. You’re scored separately in each area, and the three scores added up to give a total.  Remember, diversity is construed as racial or gender diversity, with race being most important, and if you start talking about “viewpoint diversity,” you might as well forget about the job.  Likewise, you fail if you espouse Martin Luther King’s philosophy of “colorblindness.”  King became passé a long time ago.

Here’s how Sailer described a similar rubric for USC and UNM in an earlier piece:

The South Carolina and New Mexico rubrics call for punishing candidates who espouse race neutrality, dictating a low score for anyone who states an “intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treat everyone the same.’ ” Applicants who are skeptical of DEI programming might choose to describe their commitment to viewpoint diversity. This too runs afoul of the rubrics, which mandate a low score for any candidate who defines diversity “only in terms of different areas of study or different nationalities but doesn’t mention gender or ethnicity/race.”

The rubrics likewise punish candidates for failing to embrace controversial diversity practices. They recommend low scores for candidates who “state that it’s better not to have outreach or affinity groups aimed at underrepresented individuals because it keeps them separate from everyone else, or will make them feel less valued.” These affinity groups exemplify a new kind of segregation, but expressing that view could imperil an applicant’s career.

Because of a lower funding rate of black than of white or Asian scientists applying for grants, the NIH tried in 2021 to remedy this by boosting grant ratings of minorities by asking them to tick a box specifying their race. The plan was that even if a minority applicant’s grant score fell below the funding range, the ticked box would give them a boost, allowing program officers to leapfrog the minority grants back into the range where they might be funded. (This would be, of course, at the expense of researchers who had higher grant scores.)

But as Science reported just a month later, this plan failed and the NIH was forced to eliminate the magical box:

The National Institutes of Health has yanked a notice from three NIH institutes that aimed to encourage grant proposals from minority scientists. Researchers who saw the notice as a way to help bridge a funding success gap between Black and white scientists are dismayed by the move.

. . .Some observers hoped that if the notice were expanded across NIH, it could help raise success rates for Black scientists. But earlier this year, NIH’s Office of Extramural Research (OER) barred more institutes from joining the notice because it was “confusing” and institutes already had leeway to fund “outside the payline” to “bring in diverse scientific perspectives,” the agency said.

NIH rescinded the notice “for clarity in communications,” an OER spokesperson says. “We decided that issuing a general notice that encompassed all NIH better communicated our intent.” That new notice, issued 25 October, encourages applications from underrepresented groups, but won’t enable researchers to tag their applications.

It wasn’t rescinded solely for “clarity in communications,” as you see, but likely because it was unfair and probably illegal. Yes, it’s great to encourage members of underrepresented groups to apply for grants, but handing out money preferentially to such groups prioritizes identity over merit—and in the crucial area of biomedical sciences. (Actually, two papers published in 2019 and 2020 in Science showed that there appeared to be no gender or racial bias in reviewers’ scores of NIH grants, and also that funding rates for minorities were lower largely because they applied in areas having lower funding rates (see also this 2020 paper).

At any rate, DEI statements, which may be a way to hire based on race, could be illegal for that reason alone (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits race-based hiring). They could also be illegal on First Amendment grounds, since the way they’re judged involves a form of compelled speech, which is also illegal. Finally, the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against affirmative action in college admissions could and likely will also be applied to race-based hiring of faculty and race-based awarding of grants.  There’s a note to this effect at the top of an NIH program statement from last July:

Note: Summarized here is the most recent NIH Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) discussion of UNITE. However, it is recognized that the recent Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decision regarding affirmative action may be at the front of consciousness. NIH adheres to federal law and does not make funding decisions based on race. NIH awaits further evaluation and interpretation of the SCOTUS decision to determine whether there is the need to modify any current policies or practices.

“May be at the front of consciousness”? What does that mean? “We have to find ways around it?”

The only question is whether these DEI statements are used as a proxy for race, as they well could be. But even ifr they aren’t, they’re probably still illegal. To see why, read my colleague Brian Leiter’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The legal problem with diversity statements,” which has the subtitle “Public universities can’t make hiring decisions based on political viewpoints,”

In view of the Supreme Court decision, race-based college essays proliferate

January 21, 2024 • 11:30 am

In last year’s case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court ruled, as expected, that affirmative action (the preferential admission of students based on race or ethnicity) was illegal, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. As Wikipedia notes:

The majority opinion, written by Roberts, stated that the use of race was not a compelling interest, and the means by which the schools attempted to achieve diversity (tracking bare racial statistics) bore little or no relationship to the purported goals (viewpoint and intellectual diversity and developing a diverse future leadership).

Indeed, the arguments of my own graduate school in this case, angered me: not only did Harvard lie about its own admissions practices, but advanced the argument that Roberts shot down: racial diversity = intellectual and viewpoint diversity. This was the view that propelled the earlier Bakke decision: diversity was seen, sans evidence, as an innate good.  Had affirmative action been justified as a form of reparations for people who were still suffering the effects of bigotry, I would have been more in favor of Harvard’s practices. But for years the justification of affirmative action has been rife with dissimulation.

Colleges, determined to keep racial diversity high, perhaps up to the point of equity (representation of racial groups among students equal to their proportion in the population), quietly began working on ways to violate or at least obviate this ruling. Fortunately for colleges, the Supremes had left a loophole. As the Independent notes:

While the ruling says race may not be a conscious factor in admissions, it does not prevent universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected their life “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university”.

After this, you could have predicted the results: colleges and universities would immediately begin to ask students to write essays in which they were asked how they overcame obstacles. And of course every student in a minority group, knowing the scheme, would somehow find a way to argue that their race or ethnicity imposed high obstacles to achievement, but that they had somehow surmounted these obstacles. This would of course tip off admissions offices that the applicant was in a racial or ethnic minority, and give their applications a boost. (Of course in some cases an overcoming-bigotry story would be true and could indeed speak to a candidate’s value, though it would probably say little to help universities increase their ideological or viewpoint diversity.)

Moreover, opponents of affirmative action would find this form of “holistic admissions” hard to detect, and lawsuits like last year’s would be much harder to bring.

I predicted this change in applications, which did take effect, but of course it isn’t rocket science. Universities are wedded for life to increasing racial diversity; the Supreme Court said that this was largely illegal, but left a loophole; and so colleges would exploit this sole loophole in a big way. And that, according to the article from the NYT, has come to pass. Click the headline below to read, or you can find the article archived here.  The subtitle tells the tale:

This being the NYT, they begin the article by showing the advantages of this loophole, which enabled some students to “find themselves”. But the overwhelming impression you get is that both universities and students are gaming the system to get an admissions advantage.  After all, why do colleges even need to ask students how they overcame adversity?

Have a look, for example, at the essay questions the University of Chicago posed during the last application cycle (as well as some questions from previous years): there’s one mandatory question and seven optional questions from which you pick one to answer. None of them involve “overcoming obstacles,” though question #7 gives you some leeway to sneak in race and ethnicity. Here’s a typical one (questions are often suggested by students):

Essay Option 2

“Where have all the flowers gone?” – Pete Seeger. Pick a question from a song title or lyric and give it your best answer.
– Inspired by Ryan Murphy, AB’21

The clear goal of these questions is to look for creativity and novel viewpoints—in other words, to seek out and harvest viewpoint diversity.

I don’t think this will be the case at Chicago next year, but we shall see. But here are some quotes from the NYT article (indented). The piece begins with the upside:

Astrid Delgado first wrote her college application essay about a death in her family. Then she reshaped it around a Spanish book she read as a way to connect to her Dominican heritage.

Deshayne Curley wanted to leave his Indigenous background out of his essay. But he reworked it to focus on an heirloom necklace that reminded him of his home on the Navajo Reservation.

The first draft of Jyel Hollingsworth’s essay explored her love for chess. The final focused on the prejudice between her Korean and Black American families and the financial hardships she overcame.

WHAAT? The corruption of an essay on chess into one on bigotry, solely to gain a racially-based admissions advantage, is ludicrous. But you can’t blame the student—you have to blame the unnamed university. The piece continues:

All three students said they decided to rethink their essays to emphasize one key element: their racial identities. And they did so after the Supreme Court last year struck down affirmative action in college admissions, leaving essays the only place for applicants to directly indicate their racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Notice that all three students didn’t really intend to dwell on their racial identities, but were forced to because a). that’s what the unnamed college asked about, and b). they realized that mentioning their race and heritage would help them get admitted.  This is what’s known as “gaming the system.”

There’s more:

[The Supreme Court decision] led many students of color to reframe their essays around their identities, under the advice of college counselors and parents. And several found that the experience of rewriting helped them explore who they are.

Sophie Desmoulins, who is Guatemalan and lives in Sedona, Ariz., wrote her college essay with the court’s ruling in mind. Her personal statement explored, among other things, how her Indigenous features affected her self-esteem and how her experience volunteering with the Kaqchikel Maya people helped her build confidence and embrace her heritage.

For Julia Nguyen, a child of Vietnamese immigrants based in Biloxi, Miss., rewriting her essay made her more aware of how her family’s upbringing shaped her. Julia, 18, said she felt “more proud to have this personal statement because of the affirmative action case.”

In Keteyian’s case, he said he felt “a lot more passionate” about his essay after changing his approach. As a Black student interested in engineering — a field that has struggled to diversify its ranks —Keteyian concluded his personal statement with a mix of fear and hope.

“Coming to terms with the possibility I may be one of the few Black individuals at my workplace is intimidating,” he wrote, “but something to prepare for if the ruling stands, and an opportunity for me to rewrite reality.”

Now of course some of these answers may enable colleges to really increase their viewpoint diversity, ideological diversity, or even socioeconomic diversity, but one gets the impression that this is simply a way to obviate the law and the intent of the Supreme Court’s decision. And there’s another way to accomplish these aims, a way used by the University of Chicago. (I’m not bragging here; it’s just that our school is famous for its quirky and creative application questions.)

These essays on how you surmounted obstacles will spread throughout the country. I doubt, in fact, that more than a handful of colleges won’t have a question about “overcoming adversity” on their applications.  But, of course, if you have more than two neurons to rub together, you know what’s going on here: in effect, admissions offices are asking students, in defiance of the Supreme Court ruling, to “tick a box” indicating their race.  And then admissions officers can proceed with the same kind of race-based admissions they used before. In fact, some colleges explicitly admit this.

What this will produce is a spate of anodyne admissions questions and answers and, worse, a decrease in viewpoint diversity. Identity politics will become stronger than ever, and every student will absorb a narrative about how their racial identifies were crucial in getting them into college. More than ever, one’s race will become the dominant feature of one’s persona.

But there is the expected pushback, and at least the NYT mentions it. Many authorities and lawyers, as well as most Americans, don’t like it:

The court’s ruling was meant to make college admissions race-blind — answers to the race and ethnicity question on applications are now hidden from admissions committees. A recent Gallup poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans showed support for the ban on affirmative action. Some strongly believe race should not be considered during the admissions process.

“I think it’s wrong,” said Edward J. Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, the group that brought the case to the Supreme Court.

But the ruling also allowed admissions officers to consider race in personal essays, as long as decisions were not based on race, but on the personal qualities that grew out of an applicant’s experience with their race, like grit or courage.

Who are they fooling? If you think that mentioning that you’re black or Hispanic isn’t going to ring a bell in the admissions office, I have some land in Florida to sell you. And of course if you mention that you overcame difficulties imposed on you as an Asian or Jew, fuhgeddaboudit!

Further, even some students and parents don’t like it:

While some parents said they were glad their children got to reflect on their identities in their essays, others feared that the court ruling would make it harder for their child to find community while in college.

“Even with affirmative action in place, it’s always a struggle for people in our community to get to college and to succeed in college,” said Deshayne’s mother, Guila Curley, a college counselor on the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico.

Not all students appreciated the rewriting experience as much. Some found that the ruling made them feel like they were not writing for themselves, but for someone else.

Indeed! That is precisely the case. They are writing to alert admissions officers to their race, and then embroidering a story around that nucleus.

In her initial essay, Triniti Parker, a 16-year-old who aims to be the first doctor in her family, recalled her late grandmother, who was one of the first Black female bus drivers for the Chicago Transit Authority.

But after the Supreme Court’s decision, a college adviser told her to make clear references to her race, saying it should not “get lost in translation.” So Triniti adjusted a description of her and her grandmother’s physical features to allude to the color of their skin.

The new details made her pause. “It felt like I was abiding by somebody else’s rules,” she said. Triniti added, “Now it feels like people of color have to say something or if we don’t, we are going to get looked over.”

There you go. If this is not “ticking a box”, I don’t know what is. And some students are conflicted, as their guidance counselors force students to explicitly mention race against their wishes.

Some decided to leave out their race entirely. Karelys Andrade, who is Ecuadorean and lives in Brooklyn, kept her essay focused on her family facing eviction during the pandemic and being forced to live in a shelter. “That experience was a story that needed to be told,” said Karelys, 17.

In past years, some Asian American students avoided writing about their heritage, thinking affirmative action was largely unfavorable to them, said Mandi Morales, an adviser with Bottom Line, a nonprofit for first-generation college applicants catering mostly to students of color. But the end of affirmative action in colleges led some to reconsider, counselors said.

Ms. Morales cited one student who added a mention of his “conservative” Chinese family as an example. “The explicit disclosure of his ethnicity would not have made it to the final draft prior to the ruling,” she said.

Some experts argue that the court’s ruling encourages students to write on racial conflict, trauma and adversity.

Of course it does! Again, this is bloody obvious. But even some counselors who don’t push the “adversity” scenario still insist that the students mention their identities as people of color, merely noting that students should say that their race has been a salutary factor. But again, what’s emphasized is not the content of one’s character, but the color of one’s skin.

. . . Joe Latimer, the director of college counseling at Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts, said he believes it is not necessary for students “to sell their trauma.” Instead, he advises his students to present their identities as “strength based,” showing the positive traits they have built from their experiences as a person of color.

The NYT article begins with a positive nod towards identity applications, but ends with some people speaking truth to power:

Critics of affirmative action say they are worried about essays becoming a loophole for colleges to consider an applicant’s race. “My concern is that the system will be gamed,” said William A. Jacobson, a law professor at Cornell University who founded the nonprofit Equal Projection Project.

Since the court ruling, colleges and universities have affirmed their commitment to diversity, and some officials said their institutions will continue to foster it through outreach and tools like Landscape, a database with information about an applicant’s school and neighborhood. And officials have said race can still inform decisions, as long as they are based on the applicant’s character and its connection to the university’s mission.

But some students, including Delphi Lyra, a senior at Northfield who is half-Brazilian, have reservations about the new admissions environment.

“The idea behind the ruling is to not check a box,” said Delphi, 18, referring to the race and ethnicity question on applications. “But I think, in some ways, it has almost even created more of a need to check a box.”

Absolutely!

Again, I’m not denying that if one’s heritage does increase intellectual or ideological diversity, then that does meet the requirements of the court. But you know what will happen; I outlined it above.

It’s clear that although I favor some type of affirmative action to increase intellectual and ideological diversity, it has to be done in a way that doesn’t violate the law. After all, diversity of thoughtm does increase the proliferation of opposing viewpoints that’s essential for a good college education.  So what do we do? I have two suggestions.

1.) Eliminate all questions on college applications that require you to explain how you overcame adversity. My suggestion would be to use questions that show your creativity or ability to think outside the box—in other words, questions like the University of Chicago used in the past. This increases creativity, quirkiness, and discussion.  By concentrating on racial identities and how they held one back, the new system simply strengthens identity politics.

2.) Enforce the law.  While it will become harder for authorities to determine if colleges are ticking racial boxes, it’s not impossible. Authorities can simply determine (given that recommendation #1 is followed) whether mentioning race somewhere on your application that you’re a member of an oppressed minority correlates significantly with your chance of admission. Again, you have to be careful, but it’s not hard if you use Chicago-style questions like this—the mandatory question that all applicants had to answer last year.

How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.

It’s not an inventive question (you have to answer an inventive one besides this), but neither does it prompt you to concentrate on your ethnic/racial identity. Admissions officers will be tearing their hair out, for now they have to judge solely on thoughtfulness and character.

Queensland University of Technology completely ditches merit-based hiring, favoring gender, “looks”, and personality

November 17, 2023 • 9:30 am

This gem of a story is about how one Aussie university went to the logical endpoint of the diversity-trumps-merit controversy: Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane is apparently about to hire solely on the basis of diversity, and has erased any mention of the word “merit” in its hiring policy.  This of course is ridiculous, intolerable, and a recipe for academic disaster (see our big article, “In defense of merit in science“). But it’s very “progressive”!

The big taboo that people can’t discuss is that there’s a tradeoff between merit and ethnic diversity, a tradeoff that results from members of minorities having lower traditional qualifications—a result of both historical bigotry and present cultural circumstances.  To achieve ethnic equity, then, you simply have to lower the merit-based standards you’ve used before. This is why colleges left and right are getting rid of standardized tests like the SAT for college admissions, and adopting what they call “holistic admissions”.  At the same time, high-school graduation standards are being lowered for similar reasons (see this article about New York State considering ditching the Regents exams once required to graduate.) But few people will openly admit why this happens.

Well, Queensland University of Technology is making no bones about it. In their frantic search for diversity, they’ve binned the idea of “merit” altogether. This piece comes from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, so I assume it’s kosher. Click below to read it:

The article is short, so I’ll put all of it up.  I’ve bolded the telling bits, but of course this isn’t really a new tactic. What’s novel is that they do it so blatantly and explicitly:

Queensland University of Technology’s vice-chancellor has defended the decision to remove all references to “merit” from its hiring policy.

Staff were told about the move via an internal email, which informed them that they would be moving away from “the merit principle” towards a “more inclusive suitability assessment”.

Vice-chancellor Margaret Sheil told ABC Radio Brisbane the suitability assessment would consider factors such as gender and ethnic backgrounds.

Professor Sheil said it would also consider the current demographic breakdown of their various schools and disciplines.

She said women, for example, were under-represented in science and engineering at QUT whereas men were under-represented in teaching and nursing.

She dismissed suggestions that the hiring process should be colourblind, saying that was impossible in practice.

“When people say things like ‘We do this on merit’, they’re actually reflecting the bias of their own experience,” Professor Sheil said.

“There’s so much data on this around selection, whether it’s recruitment into orchestras or into universities.

She said staff undertook unconscious bias training, and that the selection committees were chosen with diversity in mind.

She said they would aim to hire a diversity of personalities, such as recruiting more outgoing scientists who were good at industry engagement.

Professor Sheil denied the policy was a “political” decision, insisting it was a practical move to improve the university’s talent pool.

“We need to access the entire talent pool, and we don’t want everybody to look the same,” she said.

“We need the workforce to reflect the students coming through, and we also know people look at things differently when they come from different backgrounds.

Professor Sheil said she was the first female professor of chemistry in Australia and has subsequently spent her life trying to get more women into science.

QUT claims the suitability assessment is based on the Queensland Public Service Commission’s hiring strategy.

The ABC attempted to reach the QUT Liberal National Club and Young LNP for comment.

I had to resist putting the whole thing in bold!  Now if inequities are the result of “systemic racism or bigotry,”—that is ongoing codified bias or widespread bias that is keeping people out of the university—then yes, that must be remedied. But is it? Now I don’t know what the situation is in Australia, but there’s no substantial evidence of systemic racism or sexism in America, at least in STEM (see this debate at MIT). This is also the case in other fields, so if you have inequities in any field, you have to determine the causes before you can create equity.

But is equity really a desirable goal? What if differences between groups are due to differences in culture (or biology) that lead to differences in preference?  I’d suggest, for example, that the overrepresentation of women in teaching and nursing might be due not to biases against men in those fields, but to a difference between men and women in preferences: women prefer jobs that allow them to interact more with people, while men are more object-oriented. That is an alternative hypothesis for inequity, and one supported by other behavioral studies.

At any rate, you need to know whether it’s preference, bias, or a combination before you start preferentially hiring men to get degrees in teaching and nursing.  In fact, an important new meta-analysis of both male-and female-dominated professions in 44 countries (including Australia) showed that, after 2009, gender bias against hiring women in male dominated fields disappeared. In female-dominated professions there was a slight bias in hiring females (see a general discussion here).  In other words, the paucity of women in professions apparently isn’t due to bias against them.  This of course says nothing about race.

As for what kind of diversity they’re looking for beyond that involving gender, Vice-Chancellor Sheil shows her hand when she argues that it’s impossible to have “colourblind hiring”, and that “we don’t want everyone to look the same.”  That’s a code for “we want racial diversity,” of course, although Professor Shiel adds that she wants a diversity of personalities and viewpoints.  But do you really get that when you ditch merit for ethnic diversity? Why even take ethnicity into account if you want groups to “look at things differently”? Wouldn’t you want to find out what people think instead of using “how they look” as a proxy for “how they think”? It has yet to be demonstrated that greater ethnic diversity leads to greater viewpoint diversity, much less that viewpoint diversity increases more when viewpoints are assessed directly rather than through the proxy of ethnicity. And is “personality” the same thing as “viewpoint”.  An outgoing person can, for example, be either liberal or conservative.

It’s all a huge mess, and Sheil doesn’t seem to know what she’s doing except that she wants to be au courant by promoting diversity. What’s new is that she makes no bones about ignoring merit.

Ditching merit is, as I said, a recipe for disaster.  The staff at this university should be rising up in anger, for by completely eliminating merit and hiring on the basis of “personality” and “looks” (i.e., race), they’ve guaranteed that the academic quality of the university will drop.  And as for gender, there’s no evidence that there’s any bias, unconscious or otherwise, leading to inequity of sex in fields like nursing or teaching.

I wonder if this policy will really be put in place, but the Australians should be up in arms against it lest it spread to other Aussie colleges.  Are we going to see Australian academics become like those in New Zealand?

h/t Luana, Jon

The National Science Foundation gives big money to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action

September 10, 2023 • 9:15 am

Like many scientific organizations, the National Science Foundation was established to support science, but is rapidly altering its mission to achieve “social justice.”  As its webpage notes:

The U.S. National Science Foundation is an independent federal agency that supports science and engineering in all 50 states and U.S. territories.

NSF was established in 1950 by Congress to:

    • Promote the progress of science.
    • Advance the national health, prosperity and welfare.
    • Secure the national defense.

If you conceive of “advancing the national welfare” as “promoting DEI initiatives,” then you might think it’s okay that the NSF handed out a $1.3 million grant designed to promote racial diversity in universities without violating the Supreme Court’s recent prohibition on race-based admissions. (That money, of course, came from the taxpayers, as the NSF is the biggest source of non-health-related science funding in America.)

Now the Court’s ban on race-based admissions applies to graduate schools as well as to undergraduate schools.  Nevertheless, SFA v. Harvard , while prohibiting race as an explicit criterion for admitting students, still allows race to be used in a circuitous way. Wikipedia describes and quotes the majority decision (my emphasis):

The majority opinion, written by Roberts, stated that the use of race was not a compelling interest, and the means by which the schools attempted to achieve diversity bore little or no relationship to the purported goals. It was noted however that this prohibition on the use of race in deciding who would be accepted did not stop universities from considering a student’s discussion of how their race has impacted their life “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.“

Ergo we should expect to see a lot of admissions questions in which students can mention their race (especially if they’re members of minorities) in connection with their character or accomplishments, giving admissions officers an implicit lever to promote their applications.  But you can also expect that this practice, too, will be monitored like Harvard’s “personality scores” to see if it leads to ethnic discrimination. That would lead to more court cases.

Enter the National Science Foundation, which has decided to throw money at designing “rubrics”: guidelines, presumably for vetting grad-school admissions,  designed to promote racial diversity without violating the Supreme Court’s guidelines. Click to read:

Below is the University of Southern California’s announcement of the grant awarded to “understand” the effect of evaluation rubrics on racial diversity, presumably by using mock evaluations by groups of students.

The recipient, Dr. Julie Posselt, is an associate professor of education, and I’ve quoted USC’s entire announcement (indented, bolding is mine).

USC Rossier Associate Professor Julie Posselt (and project Principal Investigator) and a team of Pullias Center and University of Minnesota researchers have received a significant grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that will examine evaluation rubrics and how they affect racial equity outcomes in graduate school admissions.

Using a mixed methods design, the four-year study led by Posselt and University of Minnesota co-PI David Quinn seeks to understand rubrics’ potential and limitations in racial equity outcomes at three levels: individual bias in judgment, organizations’ standard practices, and shared values. “Rubrics are tools, and we are investigating how their design and implementation affect outcomes,” stated Posselt.

Dr. Posselt, who also serves as Associate Dean of the USC Graduate School, has long been a leader in equity and admissions in higher education. Discussing the origins of this project, she shared, “The higher education community is looking for strategies to improve the fairness and transparency of admissions. And they need tools to advance mission-driven diversity within the bounds of the new Supreme Court rulings. We were inspired to conduct this research in part by listening to our community partners in the Equity in Graduate Education Consortium and Inclusive Graduate Education Research Hub. We hope to provide them and many others with generalizable evidence to advances equitable practice.”

More broadly, this project will enable universities across the country to improve their approaches to admissions following this summer’s rulings from the United States Supreme Court. Whether and how race-neutral admissions policies can be designed to mitigate inequities is an urgent question for the country, and people are looking to rubrics as a race-neutral tool that may improve diversity.

“This project will build on over a decades-long scholarship that Dr. Posselt has been engaged with that has focused on improving equity in graduate admissions.  It is exciting to see her scholarship put into practice and with support from the NSF,” added Dr. Adrianna Kezar, Director of the Pullias Center.

Given what is bolded, particularly the last bit, it’s hard to interpret this endeavor as anything other than a way for the NSF to fund tools for grad-school admissions that can promote racial diversity while being at the same time “race neutral.”

Note two things here. The first is the deep hypocrisy, if not duplicity, of using “race neutral” tools to improve racial diversity. These may be “race neutral” in the sense of not taking race explicitly into account, but they are a means of affirmative action nonetheless, for their aim is to “mitigate inequities”.

A recent article in the NYT suggests ChatGPT-based “rubric” questions that could be used in such a way, like asking “If you could teach any college course, what would it be?” This is taken from an actual question asked by Yale University Here’s what one bot came up with, with no prompting about social justice!

If I could teach any college course, it would be a seminar on the intersectionality of social justice issues, focusing on how systems of oppression intersect and impact marginalized communities. Through discussions, case studies, and community engagement projects, students would gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of social justice work and develop strategies for creating positive change.

Now give that applicant an extra 50 points on their ranking!  And yes, this is the way that the “rubrics” are likely to work.

Second, and make no mistake about it: the “inequities” are not socioeconomic inequities, nor political inequities, religious inequities, family-history inequities (are you the first in your family to apply to grad school?, etc.) or viewpoint inequities. They are racial inequities, pure and simple. There is only one kind of “diversity” that this grant was designed to promote, at least according to USC’s description.  The Supreme Court decision mentioned viewpoint diversity, and explicitly noted that “members of the same race do not all share the exact same experiences and viewpoints, far from it,” adding that suggesting otherwise constitutes “the same naked racism on which segregation is built.”

Yet after the Supreme Court banned race-based admissions, Harvard President-Elect Claudine Gay, echoing many other college presidents, said this:

“We will comply with the Court’s decision, but it does not change our values. We continue to believe—deeply—that a thriving, diverse intellectual community is essential to academic excellence and critical to shaping the next generation of leaders.”

This conflates intellectual diversity with ethnic diversity, and does so deliberately.

Don’t take this post as an attempt to justify the absence of ethnic diversity in colleges or graduate schools.  An all-white or all-Asian Harvard or University of Chicago would suggest that America has failed in some important ways.  The reparations needed to achieve ethnic diversity in college, graduate school, or among professors, however, need to be enacted not by devising higher-education “rubrics” to somehow promote equity. By the time students get to grad school, and probably college, it’s too late. But some programs can help with promoting ethnic diversity in college, including mentoring, tutoring, or casting wider nets for applicants.

But the real work would involve creating equal opportunity for all Americans from the moment of birth, and realizing that this may not result in equal outcomes. Creating equal opportunity in this way would be immensely hard work, and would involve a huge investment of national will, effort, and resources. But it’s the only method that will finally allow us to do away with affirmative action and the workarounds funded by the likes of the NSF.  And one thing is for sure: contrived “rubrics” won’t get the job done.

h/t: Anna

My new college application essay, written by AI in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision

July 22, 2023 • 11:15 am

I got this idea from a friend, whose colleague, aware that the decision to ban race-based affirmative action in college would lead to new workarounds, used Chat-GPT to generate one of those workarounds: the “adversity essay.” That is, the Supreme Court left open the option that, although you couldn’t check a box labeled “race” on your college application, nor could colleges give you a boost simply because of your race, you could still write an essay emphasizing your ethnicity, explaining how it was associated with adversity that eventually led you to become a resilient proponent of DEI. This potential way to evade race-specific admissions has led some to say that many colleges will change their entrance essays (as well as eliminating standardized tests) into questions that can be answered by explaining how you overcame adversity, giving you ample opportunity to emphasize your minority status while not violating the Supreme Court’s standards.

The essay that gave me this idea came from my friend’s colleague asking Chat-GPT this question, “Write a college essay explaining why stubbing my toe in the 4th grade gave me the desire and character to become a neurosurgeon. Make it a good essay, not too stuffy, and mention my background as a child of carnies [carnival workers] as a reason why I have overcome adversity.” The answer was funny, but I didn’t want to just reproduce that exchange.

I decided to use my real ethnicity (99% Ashkenazi Jew) and write a college essay to work around a fictional scenario, a Supreme Court ruling that colleges could not have affirmative action favoring Jews. But my question was based on a real incident: at the school-bus stop in ninth grade in Germany, a group of (American) bullies started calling me a “dirty Jew”. That precipitated the only fistfight I’ve ever been in. I decided to use that incident as the basis of a college-admissions essay. Here’s the question I asked Chat-GPT:

Write a college essay explaining why, when a group of bullies called me a “dirty Jew” in high school, that gave me the will, desire, and character to become a biologist. Make it a good essay and concentrate on how overcoming this adversity was instrumental in my success.

Title: Embracing Diversity: How Overcoming Adversity Paved the Path to Becoming a Biologist

Introduction

High school, often described as a formative period in one’s life, can present both opportunities for growth and challenges that shape who we become. My personal experience with a group of bullies calling me a “dirty Jew” during those years not only ignited a deep sense of determination but also instilled in me a fervent desire to pursue a career in biology. This essay explores how overcoming this adversity became instrumental in my success as a biologist and how it shaped my commitment to understanding the intricacies of life.

Finding Strength in Diversity

As the echoes of those hurtful words reverberated in my mind, I realized that their cruelty stemmed from ignorance and a lack of understanding of diversity. Instead of letting their words define me, I decided to use the experience as a catalyst to explore my roots, culture, and heritage. My Jewish identity became a source of strength, reminding me that embracing diversity is vital in fostering a harmonious and inclusive society. This realization not only empowered me to stand tall against bigotry but also kindled a passion for understanding the diverse ecosystems that make up our planet.

Fostering Curiosity and Intellectual Resilience

Overcoming adversity can often fuel a profound sense of curiosity, prompting individuals to seek answers to complex questions. As I faced the challenges thrown my way, I found solace in exploring the natural world. I immersed myself in biology textbooks, documentaries, and scientific journals, seeking to comprehend the inner workings of living organisms and the broader ecological systems. Each discovery felt like a triumph against the bullies’ attempts to bring me down, reinforcing my dedication to the pursuit of knowledge.

From the Depths of Discrimination to the Heights of Empathy

Experiencing discrimination firsthand cultivated empathy within me. I realized that just as I yearned for understanding and acceptance, so did countless other beings across the natural world. This empathy became the driving force behind my decision to become a biologist with a focus on conservation. By dedicating myself to preserving biodiversity and protecting vulnerable ecosystems, I could extend the lessons I learned from my own experiences to advocate for a more compassionate and interconnected world.

Channeling Adversity into Advocacy

My encounters with prejudice taught me the importance of being an advocate for change. As a biologist, I saw the opportunity to not only study and research but also to contribute to larger societal conversations about diversity, inclusion, and environmental conservation. Through my scientific endeavors, I aimed to educate others about the interconnectedness of all life forms and the significance of cherishing our shared environment. In this way, I could transform my own painful experiences into a catalyst for positive change on a broader scale.

Conclusion

In retrospect, the bullies’ derogatory comments were a crucible that forged my character and led me on a path towards becoming a biologist. The adversity I faced taught me to embrace diversity, foster curiosity, and develop intellectual resilience. It instilled in me a profound sense of empathy and ignited a passion for advocacy and conservation. The lessons I learned from those challenging times have not only shaped my career choice but also motivated me to strive for a world where understanding and compassion prevail.

As I pursue my journey in biology, I remain committed to using my knowledge and experiences to build bridges of understanding, promote diversity, and contribute to the betterment of our global community. I firmly believe that it is through overcoming adversity that we discover our true potential and, in turn, find the strength to make a meaningful impact on the world around us.

Isn’t that great? Even I couldn’t have thought of this angle!

The National Academies post a position statement on affirmative action, followed by an email exchange between Steven Pinker and NA President Marcia McNutt

July 17, 2023 • 11:00 am

Note: This post originally was to include both Steve Pinker’s emails to National Academies President Marcia McNutt as well as her responses to Pinker (two from each), but in the end she decided that she did not want her emails reproduced here. (Both she and Pinker were sent my introduction given below.) Pinker, however, gave me permission to reproduce his.  You can try to infer McNutt’s response from Steve’s second email.

Steve sent the first email in response to the “National Academies Presidents Statement on Affirmative Action” below.

*******************

Intro (by JAC):

On June 30, the Presidents of our three National Academies issued a joint statement on the Supreme Court decision handed down the day before, the decision that found race-based admissions in universities unconstitutional. Affirmative action, at least as we’d known it for six decades, was dead.

In response to this decision, Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), John L. Anderson, President of the National Academy of Engineering, and Victor J. Dzau, President, National Academy of Medicine, issued the statement below. Because it’s on the home page of the National Academies website, was co-signed by all three presidents, is labeled “National Academies’ Presidents’ Statement” rather than “Opinion,” and lacks the standard disclaimer that the views expressed are those of the writers and not the organization, it’s natural to read it as an official position. I thus take it as an official position of the Academies and not just a personal expression of the Presidents’ sentiments.

National Academies Presidents’ Statement on Affirmative Action

Statement | June 30, 2023

Yesterday the Supreme Court issued a ruling to restrict affirmative action that will present challenges to efforts to diversify the nation’s colleges and universities. We strongly believe that the nation should remain committed to these efforts and find solutions that address racial inequities, including past and current racial discrimination and structural, systemic, and institutional racism in education.

A 2011 National Academies report stated that policies that have included affirmative action are fundamentally important to increasing the participation of members of historically underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups at the postsecondary level across all fields (NASEM, 2011, p. 100). The report further states that increasing their participation and success contributes to the health of the nation by expanding the science and engineering talent pool, enhancing innovation, and improving the nation’s global economic leadership (NASEM, 2011, p. 3). A National Academies report issued in February 2023 recommends that leaders of organizations, including colleges and universities, take action to redress both individual bias and discrimination as well as review their own processes to determine whether they perpetuate negative outcomes for people from underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups at critical points of access and advancement (NASEM, 2023, pp. 14-15).

It is essential that our nation extend the opportunity for a college education to all, enhance diverse learning experiences for all students, and create equitable pathways to grow a highly skilled workforce and to solve our most complex problems. Diversity is crucial to the success of our society and our economy.

We must also remain committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts within our own institution. We will continue to examine the implications of the decision for our staff and our work as an institution, our relationships with partners and volunteers, and our essential work of providing evidence-based advice to the nation on issues related to science, engineering, and medicine.

Marcia McNutt
President, National Academy of Sciences 

John L. Anderson
President, National Academy of Engineering 

Victor J. Dzau
President, National Academy of Medicine 

This statement could not be issued by my own school, the University of Chicago, as it violates the position of institutional neutrality laid out by our 1967 Kalven Report, which forbids our school from making official statements about politics, ideology, and morality unless they are essential to bolstering the university’s function: teaching, learning, and researching. (Our own five-line statement supporting equal opportunity and access for minority groups, while saying that we’re committed to affirmative action, says nothing about the Supreme Court decision, nor have we issued a statement about it.) The Kalven Report was issued because official statements by University officials or departments could be seen as chilling the speech of those who disagree with these positions. (Unofficial and personal statements, of course, are encouraged as free speech, but official statements impede free speech.)

The National Academies’ (NAs’) statement violates institutional neutrality in several ways. First, it is clearly a response to the Supreme Court decision, and to any reasonable individual says “that decision was wrong”. The first two paragraphs lay out why it was wrong, including the NAS’s belief that the Court’s decision presents “challenges” to the NAs’ policy to address and rectify “racial inequities”, and notes the NAs’ previous claim that affirmative action was “fundamentally important” in rectifying these inequities.

Another reason why this political statement couldn’t pass muster at Chicago is because it asserts as fact tendentious propositions like the value of affirmative action and the causation of minority underrepresentation as “past and current racial discrimination and structural, systemic, and institutional racism in education.” Again, this statement can be debated, particularly the part about existing structural, systemic, and institutional racism.

Further, the last paragraph urges people—I presume members of the NA—to engage in advancing “diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts within our own institution.” That now-familiar phrase does not, of course, refer to the abstract goals of diversity, inclusion, and equity per se, which are unexceptionable, but to a specific set of policies employed in many universities and other institutions that include affirmative action, reporting of data on racial composition, and race-conscious orientation and training sessions.

As such, this call for action again establishes an official policy, which is especially problematic because NA members are being adjured to advance “equity” in the recent sense of representation of groups in proportion to their presence in the American population. Given other causes of deviations from the population average besides bigotry (e.g., differences in preference or education), it’s debatable whether “equity” in the statistical sense is what we should be striving for instead of equal opportunity. Either way, what we have here is apparently an official endorsement of a particular political position: affirmative action was right; the Supreme Court was wrong; all discrepancies from population statistics are caused by bias; and we must keep striving to match institutional racial proportions to national ones. In taking a particular moral position—and note that both Steve Pinker and I agree with more limited ways to boost ethnic diversity, but disagree with institutional statements about such issues—the NAS is violating institutional neutrality. The Academies were created and tasked (and are still tasked) not with taking sides on ideological issues, but, as Steve notes below, to provide “independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology”.

Finally, note the assertion that “diversity” is crucial to the success of colleges, our economy and society. What kind of diversity? The only kind mentioned is diversity of “racial and ethnic minority groups.” But other kinds of diversity may be even more important to the advancement of science, particularly diversity of viewpoints (the members of a given ethnic group, of course, don’t all share a single viewpoint!), political orientation, religion, and socioeconomic status.  Again, the Supreme Court made this point in its decision:

A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.

This joint statement, then, makes a number of tendentious points that, in toto, would chill the speech of NA members who disagree.  This violates any institutional neutrality that the National Academies have—or should have based on its mission statement, which says that the job of the NAS is not to promote ideological positions but to provide scientific advice to the government.

And, as Steve points out below, taking political positions like this (again, a position that both Steve and I agree with to some extent) runs the danger of alienating the public, whether those statements be Left- or Right-wing. I recently posted about a survey in Nature showing that the magazine’s political endorsement of Biden for U.S. President (a one-off endorsement) led Republicans to be more distrustful not just of the journal, but of science in general.

It is for these reasons that scientific journals and organizations should remain as far away as possible from ideological, moral, and political statements. While editors and scientists may feel compelled to inject their opinions into official venues, they are best made in statements clearly labeled as “opinion” (and distinguished from official positions of the organization), as their overall effect on science is negative—both in chilling the speech of scientists and eroding public trust in science.  While I encourage scientists to express their own views on these issues, it should always be done in personal-opinion statements that don’t carry the imprimatur of institutions like the NAS.

In response to the statement above, Steven Pinker, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, had an email exchange with Marcia McNutt, the NAS President  (His emails were copied to the Presidents of the other two Academies as well.)

There were two back-and-forths between Pinker and McNutt. Steve gave permission to put up his emails here, but Dr. McNutt decided not to have her emails published.

Although it will become clear that I agree with Steve’s point of view in this exchange (after all, I’ve been defending the Kalven Report for years), I am posting this material to begin a discussion about diversity, about affirmative action, and about institutional neutrality. I invite readers to go through this post and give their opinions in the comments.  All I can say now is that McNutt and Pinker were in unanimity about some matters, but differed strongly about others.

Pinker’s emails:

From: Pinker, Steven <pinker@wjh.harvard.edu>
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2023 11:20 AM
To: McNutt, Marcia K. [JAC: I’ve omitted the NAS Presidents’ email addresses]
Cc:  Anderson and Dzau
Subject: NAS Statement on Affirmative Action

Dear Marcia,

I would like to express my disquiet at the recent NAS Statement on Affirmative Action. The desirability of racial preferences in university admissions is not a scientific issue but a political and moral one. It involves tradeoffs such as maintaining the proportion of African Americans in elite universities at the expense of fairness to qualified applicants who are rejected because of their race, including other racial minorities such as Asian Americans. Moreover it is a highly politicized policy, almost exclusively associated with the left, and one that majorities of Americans of all races oppose.

It’s not clear to me how endorsing one side of a politically polarizing, nonscientific issue is compatible with the Academy’s stated mission “providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology”.

The problem is worse than being incompatible with the Academy’s mission; it could substantially harm the Academy’s goal of promoting politicians’ and the public’s acceptance of science. Extensive research has shown that rejection of the scientific consensus on evolution, anthropogenic climate change, and other scientific topics is uncorrelated with scientific literacy but predictable from political orientation: the farther to the right, the greater the rejection of evolution and climate change.

In this regard, for the nation’s foremost scientific organization to identify itself with the political left is to all but guarantee that a substantial proportion, perhaps a majority, of politicians and the public will reject science as just another partisan faction with which they have no sympathy. This strikes me as unwise.

I wonder whether these considerations entered into the decision to issue the statement, and the Presidents decided to proceed nonetheless. Perhaps you considered the downsides and decided that the benefits outweighed the costs. Or, am I bringing up something that the Presidents did not even consider? If the latter, I urge you to at least take it into consideration in the Academies’ public communications, and other activities, in the future.

Sincerely,
Steven Pinker
Member, National Academy of Sciences
Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology
Harvard University

Dr. McNutt teplied that day, and the next day Pinker wrote the following in response:

On Jul 11, 2023, at 11:15 AM, Pinker, Steven <pinker@wjh.harvard.edu> wrote:

Thank you, Marcia, for your swift reply. My concerns, though, have not been allayed.

First, if your goal in issuing the statement was not to criticize the Supreme Court decision, I believe you did not succeed. Nowhere did the statement distinguish legal from scientific issues, the first two sentences are:

“Yesterday the Supreme Court issued a ruling to restrict affirmative action that will present challenges to efforts to diversify the nation’s colleges and universities. We strongly believe that the nation should remain committed to these efforts …”

I don’t think any reader of the letter could read that as anything but a criticism. If the Presidents’ goal was to issue a statement that was not perceived as criticizing the Supreme court or defending affirmative action, was a draft shown to politically diverse commentators (that is, including ones who are not on the political left) to ascertain whether it would be understood that way?

It’s also hard to understand how the statement did not “defend the approach to diversifying the student bodies that was struck down by the courts.” The third sentence approvingly says, “A 2011 National Academies report stated that policies that have included affirmative action are fundamentally important….” But it is exactly the policy of affirmative action that the court struck down. Even more puzzlingly, the 2011 report in fact says little about affirmative action, does not review research on its effects on innovation or global economic leadership, and does not list it among its six “Recommendations” or two “Priorities.”  The citation on p. 100 merely lists it among a range of policies it deems “fundamentally important.”

Even more concerning, the statement could have been lifted out of the pages of any recent left-wing opinion magazine, since it reiterates the current conviction that racial inequities are primarily due to “past and current racial discrimination and structural, systemic, and institutional racism in education” and to “individual bias and discrimination.” Entirely unmentioned are other potential causes of racial discrepancies, including poverty, school quality, family structure, and cultural norms. It is surprising to see a scientific organization attribute a complex sociological outcome to a single cause.

Finally, the statement, and your letter, equate diversity of ideas with diversity of race. The advantages of intellectual diversity are obvious (though I have not seen any statements from the Academy addressing the shrinking political diversity among science faculty, nor the increasing campaigns that punish or cancel scientists who express politically unpopular views). The assumption that racial diversity is the same as intellectual diversity was exactly what the Supreme Court decision singled out and struck down, since it carries with it the racist assumptions that black students think alike, and that their role in universities is to present their race-specific views to their classmates.

Of course, citing rigorous empirical research that is relevant to the issues facing the court or guiding admissions policies going forward would be a highly appropriate role for the Academies. These might include comparisons of the outcomes of racial versus socioeconomic preferences, the effects of standardized test­-based admissions policies on student success, and the implications for scientific quality at institutions like UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan of mandates to eliminate racial preferences. But simply extolling the ambiguous word “diversity” would seem to be beneath the intellectual standards we expect of a scientific academy.

Our goals are the same: to enhance the progress and political and public acceptance of science. In that regard I urge the three of you to give more consideration to the way that communications from the Academies signal solidarity with a political faction rather than “providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology.”

Best,
Steve

Dr. McNutt replied soon thereafter, but the response is redacted at her request.

John McWhorter: a personal take on affirmative action

July 4, 2023 • 12:30 pm

Lately John McWhorter appears to be injecting more personal information about his life into his discourse. On a recent podcast with Glen Loury, McWhorter admitted sadly that because of his heterodox writing and ideas, he’s been more or less ostracized from the community of academic linguists, and will likely not be invited to go to meetings or give talks on his field.  In his column in the NYT today, he recounts how his blackness helped him rise in academia over people with better qualification. In other words, he talks about being a beneficiary of affirmative action.  And at the end he gives his views about the issue. Like me, he appears conflicted.

Click the screenshot below to read or, if you don’t subscribe to the NYT, someone has archived the piece here.

Here are three episodes from McWhorter’s academic career:

I was hired straight out of my doctoral program for a tenure-track job at an Ivy League university in its august linguistics department. It became increasingly clear to me that my skin color was not just one more thing taken into account but the main reason for my hire. It surely didn’t hurt that, owing to the color of my skin, I could apparently be paid with special funds I was told the university had set aside for minority hires. But more to the point, I was vastly less qualified by any standard than the other three people who made it onto the list of finalists. Plus, I was brought on to represent a subfield within linguistics — sociolinguistics — that has never been my actual specialty. My interest then, as now, was in how languages change over time and what happens when they come together. My dissertation had made this quite clear.

This still rankles, and especially did so when he met one of the better-qualified candidates who wasn’t hired.

McWhorter eventually chose as his academic niche the development of creole languages, which served him well. He did get tenure, but again he says that his race helped. Referring at first to his efforts to get up to speed into linguistics beyond than his speciality, he says this:

But it all felt like a self-rescue operation, an effort to turn myself into a good hire after the fact. That backfilling of needed skills is a lot to ask of someone who also needs to do the forward-looking research necessary to get tenure.

Of course, not everyone endeavors this Sisyphean task, and the culture I refer to has a way of ensuring others don’t have to. There is a widespread cultural assumption in academia that Black people are valuable as much, if not more, for our sheer presence as for the rigor of what we actually do. Thus, it is unnecessary to subject us to top-level standards. This leads to things happening too often that are never written as explicit directives but are consonant with the general cultural agenda: people granted tenure with nothing approaching the publishing records of other candidates, or celebrated more for their sociopolitical orientations than for their research.

Above we see him suggesting, as he has before, that it is patronizing to hold black academics to standards lower than you hold white ones. He makes this explicit when he talks about his own experience on admissions committees.

I had uncomfortable experiences on the other side of the process as well. In the 1990s, I was on some graduate admissions committees at the university where I then taught. It was apparent to me that, under the existing cultural directive to, as we have discussed, take race into account, Black and Latino applicants were expected to be much more readily accepted than others.

I recall two Black applicants we admitted who, in retrospect, puzzle me a bit. One had, like me, grown up middle-class rather than disadvantaged in any salient way. The other, also relatively well-off, had grown up in a different country, entirely separate from the Black American experience. Neither of them expressed interest in studying a race-related subject, and neither went on to do so. I had a hard time detecting how either of them would teach a meaningful lesson in diversity to their peers in the graduate program.

Yes, that’s a good question, and one that deserves an answer. As for the last bit, where he sees affirmative action as patronizing and condescending, there are black academics who would disagree with him—not just ones who didn’t need affirmative action to achieve their positions, but also ones who admit they did, but don’t care:

Perhaps all of this can be seen as collateral damage in view of a larger goal of Black people being included, acknowledged, given a chance — in academia and elsewhere. In the grand scheme of things, my feeling uncomfortable on a graduate admissions committee for a few years during the Clinton administration hardly qualifies as a national tragedy. But I will never shake the sentiment I felt on those committees, an unintended byproduct of what we could call academia’s racial preference culture: that it is somehow ungracious to expect as much of Black students — and future teachers — as we do of others.

That kind of assumption has been institutionalized within academic culture for a long time. It is, in my view, improper. It may have been a necessary compromise for a time, but it was never truly proper in terms of justice, stability or general social acceptance. Whatever impact the Supreme Court’s ruling has on college admissions, its effects on the academic culture of racial preference — which by its nature often depends less on formulas involving thousands of applicants than on individual decisions involving dozens — will take place far more slowly.

But the decision to stop taking race into account in admissions, assuming it is accompanied by other efforts to assist the truly disadvantaged, is, I believe, the right one to make.

And yet, at the beginning of the piece, he says that by the time of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision, “I’d personally come to believe that preferences focused on socioeconomic factors — wealth, income, even neighborhood — would accomplish more good while requiring less straightforward unfairness.” There’s a good case to be made for that, as it seems fairer, though some readers here think that using socioeconomic standards—giving a leg up to those most disadvantaged, regardless of race—won’t advance diversity at all.  I’m not ready to give up and go by a procedure that completely ignores race, and though we can’t take race into account, we can, perhaps, eliminate the complete erasure of ethnic diversity in elite colleges via using socioeconomic standards.

Another advantage of socioeconomic considerations is that, to me at least, they’d seem to create more intellectual diversity than would simply upping ethnic diversity. For some reason I think that mixing disadvantaged people from all groups (and also taking account of political and ideological diversity during admissions) would generate more useful discussion among students than simply race-based admissions. Those late-night bull sessions were pivotal in my education, and you don’t have them without discussion and disagreement.

Finally, I do agree with McWhorter’s views expressed elsewhere: the time is coming when affirmative action for race has to come to an end, for if it hasn’t done what it was supposed to after sixty years, it’s time to contemplate other methods, methods that involve creating equal opportunity from birth. And I also agree with him that, as far as we possibly can, we should not lower admissions standards for some ethnic groups. As McWhorter notes, “it is somehow ungracious to expect as much of Black students — and future teachers — as we do of others.”